Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce is a journalist and author based in London, UK. He writes regularly for New Scientist magazine, the Guardian newspaper and Yale e360 web site. His books include Peoplequake, When the Rivers Run Dry and, mostly recently, The Land Grabbers.

Contents authored by Fred Pearce

The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have left vast areas of tainted, uninhabitable land. Their respective governments' drastically different approaches have had a range of consequences for wildlife, farming and the future of those two landscapes.

On a global scale, the EU's consumption of agricultural products is perhaps the single largest driver of deforestation. This may change, with the EU's new Action Plan on Deforestation, but whether or not this plan will protect the livelihoods of smallholder farmers remains to be seen.

Faced with the pressure of finding new ways to feed its massive population, China has decided invested $450 billion into farming. While the exact uses of this cash injection remain mysterious, the move represents a massive shift back towards domestic food production.

Smallholder farms and large industrial farms are equally damaging to their ecosystems if they are monocropped. That said, shifting away form monocropping isn't only beneficial for ecosystems: it has economic rewards as well.

Received wisdom on forest conservation tells us that working forests are bad for the environment: good forests are "pristine." However, there is no such thing as a pristine forest, and would-be conservationists have much to learn from those who have lived and worked in productive forests.

Ecomodernism embraces agricultural intensification as one of the primary means of decoupling humanity from the environment. However, ecomodernism relies on some problematic assumptions about the division between humanity and nature and the nature of human use of rural spaces.

Development banks take a reductionist approach to hydropower; the critical counter-discourse calls for more nuance. These two discourses rarely cross paths, but a new paper in Global Environmental Change directly addresses both views from a critical scientific perspective.

Can reporting on climate change become a problem – hampering policy-making on sustainability and providing an alibi for the real environmental villains? I believe it can. A growing tendency in the media to frame every environmental problem as rooted in a changing climate is having the effect of depoliticizing the issue and excusing local actors.

What do we all know about climate change, beyond the fact that the world is warming, the wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas drier? With scientists telling us that the trend is bound to worsen - what are we to make of a new study saying that this is all wrong?

Not since the Green Revolution half a century ago has there been such a golden age for agronomy. But unlike the hey-day of new high-yield varieties of rice, wheat and corn, there is no consensus today about where the science of farming should be headed and what it should be trying to deliver.

What is the future for Indonesia and its landscapes? The country is at an extraordinary moment. Under the new populist government of Joko Widodo, huge areas of the country’s state lands may change hands in the next few years.

Climate change activists were all smiles at the conclusion of the Paris Agreement last weekend. But what about those wanting an agreement that would restore and sustainably manage landscapes? What did the deal say about forests and forest dwellers? Did it give a boost to “climate-smart agriculture”? Or do we just face a blitz of low-carbon hydroelectric dams?

For most Westerners, the idea of common lands conjures up images of English village greens or abandoned wasteland. But in much of the developing world, they are the lifeblood of hundreds of millions of people, sources of sustenance and spirituality, of wealth and welfare.

Soil, and what it means for human survival, hasn’t gotten this much attention since the 1970s and 1980s. But as soils return to the high tables of policymaker, who will be the winners? Fertiliser companies or smallholders? Land grabbers or the hungry?

Cacti could be the new jatropha. There is a buzz in some biofuel circles that these desert succulents are set to become the next wonder energy crop -- yielding prodigious quantities of biomass for biogas fermentation to generate electricity in the semi-arid lands of Africa and elsewhere.

How will the world’s poor farmers be helped to adapt to oncoming climate change? What will prevent the rural inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa from starving as their crops shrivel in the predicted mega-droughts? The answer, apparently, is insurance.

What are we to make of the proliferation of water funds round the world dedicated to maintaining the watersheds that keep rivers flowing, aquifers charged and taps full? Should we embrace the engagement of some of the world’s most famous water guzzlers?

Something interesting is happening in Kenya – something that, if successful, could reverberate through Africa and transform the continent’s landscape management. Formerly all-powerful state agencies are handing over day-to-day control of key resources like forests, rivers and wildlife to local communities.

What do you do with a landscape when it has been overwhelmed by a tsunami? When the coastline is altered beyond recognition, the paddy fields filled with salt, the trees flattened, the villages washed away and the population decimated?

The new battle cry uniting climate campaigners, environmentalists, agriculturalists and advocates of a landscape approach to planning is for the restoration of former forest land. But what do we mean by “restoration”? Restoration to what? And for whom?

I am a journalist. I flit in and out of places. But I have spoken to enough people at the receiving end of aid to know that what they crave is engagement, time, consistency and above all people who listen and act on what they are told. Not much aid work these days looks like that.

For IWMI Director General, Jeremy Bird, the world's emerging water crisis in most places is one of management rather than of absolute water shortages -- of not making the most of clean water, and of profligate disregard for the value of waste water.

Any day now, a hundred Bangladeshi smallholder farmers will be planting their annual aubergine crop. But this year this select band will not be planting their usual seeds of the crop; these family farmers, chosen by the country’s agricultural researchers, will be growing a genetically modified (GM) variety.

How can we best protect forests for the myriad ecosystem services they provide – capturing and storing carbon, protecting river systems and soils, maintaining biodiversity and ensuring access to bushmeat? The presumption is that the local forest dwellers and users have to be kept out. But that increasingly looks like exactly the wrong approach.

Of all the causes of the horrendous on-going civil war in Syria, the one that is least discussed is water. It may be a stretch to call the conflict a water war. But, as Brian Richter notes in his book Chasing Water, years of drought in Syria have "created a tinderbox for revolt" as wells run dry and food prices in local markets soar.

The destruction by human action of ecosystems is leaving communities more vulnerable to natural disasters – in harm's way. The solution lies not in a doomed effort to prevent floods, but in improving the resilience of the landscape by finding ways to embrace managed floods through reviving natural wetland ecosystems. Cyclone shelters can save lives, but not livelihoods.

For the first time, in the latest assessment of the IPCC on impacts and adaptation, there is a much greater recognition that for poor people living precarious lives, things look much more complicated than they do in climate models. It is a breath of fresh air.

Most of the trillions of dollars spent on building large dams round the world in the past half century or so have been a waste of money. Many people may have suspected as much, but now there is peer-reviewed research to back it up.

How to kill a nation’s rivers. I visited Poland, where they are doing just that. It is a terrifying lesson for the many other nations worried about floods and determined to engineer their way to a solution. Thailand, among others, please listen. There is a better way.

More wetlands have been drained in the name of extending and improving agriculture than for any other reason. Yet real farmers often object, especially smallholders dependent on wetlands for parts of their livelihoods.

At the landscape scale, governance, ownership and ecology are inseparable. But, even with the best will in the world, making that compatible with the investment strategies of rich people in faraway places looks hard.

A couple of years ago, Oxfam claimed that an area of agricultural land in developing countries almost the size of Western Europe had in recent years been taken over the foreign investors. A new report says a majority of the biggest “land grabs” never got beyond the planning stage. Is the great land rush over?

Soils should be at the heart of "climate-smart agriculture". No-till agriculture is as good at capturing carbon as planting a rainforest -- and should be treated as a similar "carbon credit" in any future deal to set up a carbon trading system round the world, says Guadagni of the World Bank.

Precious little work directly addresses the corporate presence. Those who want effective policies to protect smallholders and promote sustainable landscapes need to do some serious thinking about how to handle agribusiness corporations.

The influence of the intergovernmental Mekong Basin Commission to manage the river is hobbled by its absence of the biggest and most upstream country on the river – China. This time we are in Africa, with Zambia the only country that hasn't joined the commission.

Is it surprising that in the aftermath of the financial crisis, in a global economy growing on credit, physical assets like land and crops are gaining value? The startling and frankly criminal scale of income disparities between citizens in the global economy have been growing larger for more than a generation now.

Whatever happened to jatropha? Is the wonder biofuel that crashed back on the up? And should we care? Last July, while visiting Liberia, I met a local man who said he was a “recruiter” of smallholder farmers to grow jatropha, the bush that could, if you believe the hype, deliver cheap biodiesel to the world.

Cotton, sugar, palm oil... you name it. Most governments in the developing world believe such plantation cash crops must be a better use of land, and must deliver greater economic returns, than cattle pastures.

It seems that the “cost of ignoring people’s rights is rising,” as angered farmers retaliate against land grabbers. With Myanmar’s new freedom, what will the future hold for smallholder Burmese farmers?

Farming is an old man’s occupation. That’s what they tell you in Africa. The kids head for the cities as soon as they grow up, and many never come back. For that reason, if no other, small farms are doomed. Agribusiness is the way forward. Land grabbers? Bring them on.

With droughts on three continents triggering rising food prices, Malthusian fears are growing about the world’s ability to feed a fast-growing population. Do we have enough land? What about climate change? Will we – as the Stockholm World Water Week will ask in the coming days – have enough wa